Scott Johnson is on the show to chat about Google’s acquisition of Songza and what this means for how we listen to music. Also get a preview of Nerdtacular!

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

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A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Justin Robert Young is racing from the airport, so his part will be played by Veronica Belmont and eventually we’ll all talk about Yahoo picking up Community and what this means for the future of television.

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest: Veronica Belmont & maybe, just maybe JuRY

Headlines

GigaOM reports Samsung announced the Galaxy S5 Mini Tuesday. The smaller version of the S5 has a 4.5-inch AMOLED screen that’s 720p capable, 1.4GHz quad-core processor, 1.5GB of RAM and a microSD card slot. Those specs are a touch below the bigger S5 but the mini also comes with the waterproofing, heart rate monitor, fingerprint scanner and Galaxy Gear compatibility just like the big version. It goes on sale in 4 colors starting in Russia in July and will expand to global markets afterwards.

TechCrunch reports Microsoft has increased security for OneDrive and Outlook.com. Outlook.com now supports TLS which keeps email encrypted as long as the receiving email service also supports TLS. Both Outlook.com and OneDrive now support Perfect Forward Secrecy encryption as well which helps mitigate damage if a secret key is compromised.

Engadget reports GE is taking on the smartphone-controlled light bulb dominance of Philips with some new bulbs called Link. The bulbs require a $30 hub to operate, but then the bulbs themselves are only $15-$25 each. Lifx bulbs run $100, Philips new Lux bulbs are $40 and even Insteon costs $30. Link bulbs are controlled through the Wink app made by Quirky and should last 23 years or so. Home Depot is taking pre-orders for the bulbs today and they’ll ship this autumn.

Computerworld passes along that DARPA has set the date for the final stage of its three-phase Robotics Challenge to be held June 5 and 6, 2015, in Pomona, Calif. 11 teams will compete for a $2 million prize, though DARPA expects the number of entrants to increase. The first two phases involved demonstrating software for autonomous etasks like walking, using tools, climbing and driving. In the finals, the robots will face a full-scale disaster situation, and have to use a series of ladders, doors, cars and valves to handle the situation.

TechCrunch The US National Archives and Record Administration has made its ongoing efforts to upload content to Wikimedia Commons a core part of its purpose. NARA uploaded 100,000 images in 2012 as a test. 4,000 Wikipedia articles featuring NARA records received more than one billion page views in 2013. The uploads range from mundane federal agency records to World War II photos and presidential portraits.

News From You

MacBytes posted the Verge article giving a few more details on Keurig’s Coffee pod DRM scheme. Key patents on Keurig’s pods expired in 2012 leading to third-party pods. Keurig makes most of its money selling pods not machines. The new brewer going on sale this autumn, scans pods for special markings, based on anti-conterfeiting technology used by the US Mint. Its essentially DRM for coffee. It’s also going to make your old Keurig machine much more valuable.

robodashy has the Mashable story that the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved ReWalk Robotics’ personal exoskeleton for marketing in the U.S. The 46-pound robotic legs support their own weight plus a 220-pound user who wears a 5-pound backpack. A wrist-device with physical buttons controls the device. The battery is designed to support a full day of intermittent walking, but if the wearer walks non-stop, the battery will last three to four hours. Users have to be between 5-foot-3 and 6-foot-3. The device costs $69,500 and is not covered by insurance in the US.

spsheridan submitted the Ars Technica story about No-IP.com going down after Microsoft seized 22 domain names it claimed were being abused in malware-related crimes. Millions of legitimate servers relied on No-IP for dynamic domain name services, including AlphaGeekRadio.Microsoft claimed No-IP domains were used 93 percent of the time by Bladabindi and Jenxcus malware and its operator, Defendant Vitalwerks did not take sufficient steps to address the abuse.

And tjburbank sent in the story from Daily Dot about Paypal freezing the account of crowdfunded ProtonMail. The ProtonMail project wants to make an easy email encryption tool. A Paypal representative said it was not sure if ProtonMail was legal. Apparently Paypal figured it out as the account was restored late this morning. Paypal in a following statement claimed “a technical problem this week resulted in PayPal applying restrictions to the account.” Right. ProtonMail says it will not rely on Paypal for donations until its assured there will not be a repeat of this.

Discussion Section: 

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/30/community-will-get-its-sixth-season-on-yahoo/?ncid=rss

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/community-sixth-season-yahoo/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/community-returning-sixth-season-yahoo-715857

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682555/ken-marino-shows-how-to-parody-the-already-ridiculous-with-burning-love

Pick of the Day: SNL Archives on Yahoo Screen

Jennie’s pick of the day is the SNL archive on Yahoo Screen. Disclaimer: Jennie worked for Yahoo’s video department not too long ago. And then that ended. Yet she STILL wants to recommend the incredibly deep bench of archival Saturday Night Live clips that you can find on Yahoo Screen, including ones you don’t often see online due to music rights, like Will Ferrell’s gut-busting ‘Cowbell’ sketch as well as Chris Farley & Patrick Swazye’s legendary dance-off in the “Chippendales” sketch. The archive also includes older, deeply subversive clips like Buck Henry’s “Uncle Roy” and the legendary face-off between Chevy Chase & Richard Pryor known as “Word Association.” Enjoy the rest of your day, people.

Wednesday’s Guest: Scott Johnson with a Nerdtacular’14 preview.

Don Reisinger is on the show. We’ll chat about why Facebook thought it was OK to play with our emotions for science.

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest: Don Reisinger, cnet.com

Headlines

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports new details about the next Version of Windows, codenamed Threshold, expected to arrive in Spring 2015. Microsoft reportedly will aim Threshold squarely at disgruntled desktop users still using Windows 7. Some versions of Threshold will be all desktop, while some will focus on the tiled screen or desktop screen depending on whether a keyboard is attached and some version meant for tablets and phone swill have no desktop view at all. And yes word is STILl that the mini Start menu showed off at BUILD will be part of Threshold. A preview version of Threshold should arrive in the autumn and one more update to Windows 8.1 will arrive before Threshold does.

Reuters reports Google is finally pulling the plug on its social network from 2004 called Orkut on Sept. 30. Orkut was popular in Brazil and India, but Google says they’ve had more success with YouTube, Blogger and Google+. Orkut users can continue to post until Sept. 30 and can retrieve posts after that dat from an archive of all Orkut communities. I will miss you ‘fans of turn signals’ community!

Facebook got in some hot water as attention as called to a March publication of a study in PNAS that manipulated 689,000 users News Feeds from Jan. 11-18, 2012 in order to study emotional contagion. For the affected users either positive or negative emotional posts had a 10-90% chance of being removed. The study found those with fewer positive posts in their feed used 0.1% fewer positive words in subsequent posts and those with fewer negative posts in their feed used 0.07% fewer negative words. Controversy broke out over whether the Facebook Terms of Service sufficed as informed consent for the study.

VentureBeat reports Google Glass is now banned in some UK movie theaters over piracy concerns. Vue and the Cinema Exhibitors’ association trade group both feel the shaky 30-45 minutes of video Google Glass is capable of recording poses enough of a threat to their bottom line that they must fight back. Google said in a statement that Glass should be treated no differently than cell phones in a theater and that “The fact that Glass is worn above the eyes and the screen lights up whenever it’s activated makes it a fairly lousy device for recording things secretly.”

Engadget reports Samsung has four new budget Android KitKat phones. The 4.5-inch Galaxy Core II leads the way with a 1.2GHZ processor 768 MB RAM and 4GB of storage. There’s also the 4-inch Galaxy Ace 4 and the 3.5-inch Galaxy Young 2 and Star 2. All run TouchWiz with pricing and availability to be announced. 

TechCrunch reports Twitter is rolling out mobile app promotion ads that take users to app downloads or the apps themselves if already installed. Along with that, Twitter’s unveiling new cost-per-app-click pricing for the unit and a dashboard to track usage. The ads appear only for iOS and Android mobile users. 

The Verge notes the US Supreme Court decline to hear Google’s challenge to dismiss a complaint that its streetview cars illegally collected data from private WiFi networks. Google has admitted its cars were accidentally collecting unencrypted traffic and stopped the practice when it was discovered. Google is fighting a lawsuit that it violated the Wiretap Act. Google’s defense has been that tyhe act allows the interception of unencrypted radio communication, but a federal appeals court rejected that logic saying the act referred to predominantly auditory broadcasts.

News From You

spsheridan submitted the GigaOm story that US President Obama is expected to name Phil Johnson, a pharmaceutical industry executive, as the next Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Johnson has previously tried to block legislation aimed at reigning in patent trolls. The Director’s job has been vacant for 18 months, and former Google employee Michelle Lee, the deputy director, has been managing the department.

Could Netflix be called a cybersecurity threat? metalfreak pointed us to the Slashdot posting that quotes Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology making the argument that wording in the proposed US bill “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act” could do just that. A ‘threat,’ according to the bill, is among other things anything that may result in an unauthorized effort to ad-
adversely impact the availability of information. Nojeim argues that the vague wording could be used to justify slowing down Netflix at congested connections. 

KAPT_Kipper submitted the GigaOM story that Blackphone has started shipping. Blackphone is aconsumer grade handset running a forked version of Android called PrivatOS bundled with privacy-related apps including Silent Phone and Silent Text (for normal voice, video and text communications), Disconnect (VPN and search), SpiderOak (cloud storage) and the Smarter Wi-Fi Manager (for protection from dodgy hotspots). The first units of the $629 handset to ship are for European LTE users, and U.S. units will follow.

Discussion Section: 

http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/28/facebook-experiment-emotions/

http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/29/facebook-explains-emotion-experiment/?ncid=rss_truncated

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

http://codingconduct.tumblr.com/post/90242838320/frame-clashes-or-why-the-facebook-emotion-experiment

https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/06/30/what-facebooks-own-rules-say-about-its-news-feed-experiment/?mod=rss_Technology

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/06/30/where-are-the-limits-what-users-are-saying-about-facebooks-news-feed-experiment/?mod=rss_Technology

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/29/ethics-in-a-data-driven-world/

I religiously watch The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and some other such shows. But why not watch them faster? Swift is one of many apps I’ve tried which speed up video playback without distorting the audio at all – I can watch some shows at 2x playback speed without issue.

Many apps do this, but Swift integrates really well with YouTube too. Want to listen to a lecture from YouTube at 2x speed? Plop the URL into this app and you can do so, and even download the entire video for offline playback Or just play videos already in your library. Or stream over your local home network. Lots of other cool features too. More than worth the $3 I paid for it.

Tuesday’s Guest: Justin Robert Young